 Tamil Nadu crossed 2 lakh COVID-19 positive cases on 25 July. The state continues to be in second position in total number of cases and third in total number of deaths in the country for a long time. This was the status of the state when the count was at 50,000 on 17 June 2020. It took 103 days to reach this mark. It has taken only 16 days to reach double of it 1 lakh mark. In another 22 days, the count has doubled to 2 lakh. By looking at the increase of the positive cases across the districts, the spread is evident throughout the state. Initially Chennai was the epicenter of the cases reported, but over a period of time the spike has been extended to other districts as well. Chennai has shown quite flat for around 2 weeks due to continuous lockdown, but again recorded a marginal rise in the last couple of days. 19 MLAs in which 4 ministers have tested positive in the state so far. In Chennai alone, more than 1600 police personnel have been infected. People from various sectors, including hundreds of health workers and government officials have been affected. 84 Rajbhaven employees tested positive last week. Testing rate is high in the state, but as long as tracing and isolations are not happening, testing alone is not helping in condemning the pandemic. The recovery rate is high in the state, but many other states also shown similar trend. Due to multiple lockdowns, the air value or the effective reproduction number for Chennai has fallen below 1 in the second week of July, but again it is going high in the last couple of days. R-value is in search across the districts, it is more than 1 in Madurai. The neighboring districts of Chennai, Chengalpet and Tirvalur recorded more than 10,000 cases in total. More than half of the districts are reporting more than 100 positive cases on a daily basis. Since the spikies spread throughout the state, was the contiguous Doctor on Effective? Dr. Krishnaswamy comments on it. Dr. Krishnaswamy-Karan, the EDMK government is completely mismanaged the situation. Just as the central government, BJP government mismanaged the situation on the all-India level, the Tamil Nadu government has also mismanaged it. But luckily, because Tamil Nadu has a stronger public health setup compared to other states. Next to Kerala, Tamil Nadu has a fairly good public health system. So because Tamil Nadu has a good public health system, there has been some amount of capacity to go, this disease has not become very rapidly spread everywhere. But Tamil Nadu government did not respond immediately. The first case when it was reported, at that time the airports were not, people were only using the thermometer, that infrared thermometer to screen people in the airport. That is useless. Because you know clearly that people with COVID-19 fever is not the first symptom, fever is only something that comes later and there are people who may not get fever and even those without any symptoms can still transmit the virus. So what they should have done is at the airport, all passengers should have been screened using real-time PCR testing and they should have been isolated with their phone positive. That was not done. And all other people who are coming into by train also, you know the train station again they had these guns, these infrared thermometers, which they were putting on the people's forehead and saying go. But that is a useless thing. Lockdown is not a solution. The lockdown is only a temporary thing that is helping you to build the capacity to tackle the solution. So everywhere, New Zealand also use lockdown. No, there are countries which did not do lockdown. For example, South Korea did not do lockdown at all and you know Mongolia also is saying but countries like New Zealand did lockdown, but they did in a measured manner. And the thing is the lockdown, first of all lockdown was announced within 4 hour duration. No, this is not needed at all. There was no necessity to announce a lockdown with only 4 hours of information for everybody. So the lockdown could have been planned better. Announcement of the lockdown should have been planned. They should have seen and suddenly saying, okay, after lockdown so many migrant labourers are coming as if it is some new news, obviously that will happen. So such things should obviously have been as anticipated before announcing the lockdown. And once the lockdown is declared, it was also not used to build all the testing reagents, getting reagents. No, Iceland started getting its reagents and testing kits ready in January itself. Even before the WHO announced a pandemic, Iceland, which is so far away from China, started preparing for testing kits and reagents. But even after we announced the first lockdown, we did not do anything. India did not make any preparation to make its own indigenous testing kits and reagents available. And improving the amount of protective equipment available, that also has not been done. The hospitals, public hospitals, beds were not newly created. Already existing beds for other patients, other diseases were taken over for COVID. So other patients, other diseases suffered. So the 1 lakh or whatever number of beds that were made available was not from new capacity. So the period of the lockdown should have been used to build either new hospitals or build additional areas where beds are available and so on. So lockdown was announced without any planning preparation and lockdown was also not managed. It was completely mismanaged. That is the reason why you are having all these problems now. It is treated as a law and order problem, not like a health problem. There again, they are following the same model as the BJP government in the center. Why is the home minister in charge of this whole thing, it is not a law and order problem. Why is the health minister not speaking anything on this COVID issue, why is the health ministry not getting involved at all. The home ministry is only telling when the lockdown should happen. This is because it should have been handled by the health minister, not the home minister. So it is treated as a law and order problem with the BJP and the EDMK also treats it as a law and order problem. See, it is not a personal health problem, it is a public health problem. But the government is trying to turn it into a personal problem saying that you take care of things like Ayushman Bharat, you take care of things, everything. But that is now how it has to be, it is a public health problem. As I said, COVID-19 people recover, the death rate of COVID-19 is population wise, it is less than the accident death rate. So because there are so many people dying in accidents, you don't tell people don't go out of the house, you don't travel anywhere, you don't go anywhere. The only thing is because the death rate is happening in a short period of time, so many people are getting affected in a short period of time, there is a large load of patients in the hospitals and patients who are not being able to treat it in the hospitals, they may develop more severe things and go into complications. So the problem is not one of the virus causing greater problems, the problem is one of not having enough bed capacities, not having enough doctors, public health assistants to tackle that. So it is like saying that what you do when there are so much people make airplane travel safe, they don't say it because if you fly you will die, it's not that way, there are still plane accidents. But airplane travel is made so safe because there are so much of the support systems that are developed, like in car, car also or any transport. So same way here also if the public health system, public health system doesn't mean only hospitals, public health system means the roads, for example you may have a health center but from the village to the health center you have to go take a walk and go, it's not possible. So having good transport systems, having good public transport systems, having good hospitals, all freely available, now 75% of an individual's money is spent on health, under the current privatization center, no for every person, 75% of the budget goes into health mostly, health and education. But the thing is that health therefore has to be made into a public property and made available freely to everybody, then you will not have all these problems. So the next epidemic that is coming, the next pandemic that is coming, this sort of approach is done, every pandemic will be treated separately. But if the government increases the public health setup, increases the number of doctors, increases the number of health workers, makes transport freely available to people, makes beds, hospitals available freely to people, medication available, then when the next pandemic comes, we don't have to have this type of a reaction to that. This reaction is because of the failure of the public health system, the privatization of the public health system is what has led us to this situation.